Making a Mod - Best Practices
This article is designed to give potential modders some pointers and things to keep in mind while creating their project. Remember that these are just guidelines intended to help you – you do have to abide by them, but they may teach you something useful.
Starting Out
Scoping out your project
If you wish to actually complete your project, it is extremely important that you create a manageable scope. This means that you must avoid being overly ambitious. Creating a project that is too massive will likely end up cancelled. In the start it might be difficult to imagine how much work will go into your project. Many people will imagine a big project and consider it "doable" in the start, but later realize that it is a lot more work than first anticipated. The best way to combat this is to create a limited scope off the bat. It is much better to be on the conservative side and create a project that is smaller than what you think you can do. A small project is better than a cancelled project. If you would like to create a big project, it is best to first create a small one, as to get more accustomed to the process.
Assembling a team
Idea: If you are going to work in a team, make sure to create the mod idea together. An unfortunately popular phenomenon is people joining a team, getting a sneak-peek at the mod and losing interest. Creating the mod premise together can help keep the members invested.Working on a mod alone is entirely possible, especially if the mod is very small, but sometimes you may want to collaborate with others and assemble a team. That said, do not assume working in a team is always easier than working alone; there are advantages and disadvantages. The biggest advantages of working in a team is that you can concentrate one's skills in a particular area, such as level design, programming, writing. The resulting output might have higher quality because of this. On the flip side, the many challenges of working in a team can negate the advantages if you do not manage the team well. It is crucial that the team has a team leader who can organize the group of people, tell them what they should focus on, and follow up how things are going over time. This article does not explain what it takes to be a good team leader, because this topic is very expansive, but without structure in your team it will likely stall the project; some people may not work, others may not know what to work on. The team leader is likely to be one of the developers in a smaller team, but the important aspect is that everyone agrees on who will hold the responsibility for the progress of the project. When you are looking for potential team members, do not fall into the trap thinking more people will make the project easier. The more people you have, the more time will be spent managing them. Having for instance two persons working on the same kind of content (like map design) requires them to be able to co-operate as well, which adds another burden to the team leader that they must consider as they organize the team. For smaller teams it is best to stick with as few people as you can get away with. A guiding rule here is to keep the team small. Adding more people to the team does not mean more work will get done.
Even if you don't have a team, participating in public discussions about modding can help you and others learn. This can be done in the modding channels on the FG Discord server. Share your work and ask questions!
Mod Design
One of the most useful questions you can ask yourself is "Why should someone play my mod?" It's a hard question to answer truthfully, but if you can answer it well, you're on the right track. Think about what other mods are out there, and what they offer. Does your mod offer something new to the players? Is what you offer enough to entice players who are busy playing other mods? Even if you cannot answer this question, just thinking about it will probably help your mod.
Realistic Goals
Create realistic goals for yourself. Think about how long it takes a commercial developer to make a horror game with 20 maps. If your mod is going to have 30 maps, the development process is going to be very hard. The thing to keep in mind here is "Quality over Quantity." Players would far prefer to have a short, unique and well balanced mod than big, repeating mod.
Do not be afraid to cut content and features. If the mod looks like it's never going to be finished, or there's some content that you don't think meets the quality of the rest of the mod, then start cutting.
Learn to Take Criticism
One crucial thing to learn is to know how to receive criticism about your work. When sharing your work online and with your team, criticism will be inevitable. If someone did not like what you made or suggested a better way to achieve something, there is no reason for you to attack them. Attacking someone just because they did not like your work, or because they suggested something else, is a destructive and toxic behavior, especially if you can't take suggestions from your own team members. Take constructive criticism to heart, and ignore the destructive ones. Taking suggestions from other people doesn't make you less of a person, quite the opposite.
Compete With Gameplay and Story
Do not just focus on classic horror, be creative and make mods with interesting story and gameplay. It doesn't even have to be horror to begin with. The issue with horror games is that it's very hard to make something unique and interesting for players to engage. Horror cannot be repeated, which is why it is recommended to break boundaries. You don't have to worry about the commercial viability of new gameplay styles or bizarre stories, you can try out truly new ideas. Most mods cannot compete on a content level (maps, models, sounds, etc) with commercial products. They've got teams of artists with years of experience. Beat them with your gameplay and creativity. Players will play a mod that has very little in the way of new content, but has interesting story and some new gameplay thrown into the mix.
Understand the Engine
You really should read the documentation of the game you want to mod. The thing you'll learn most by doing so isn't whether you can do X with the engine, but rather how X should be done so it works well. There will be multiple ways to achieve what you want to create, but only one way would be the best and correct way to do it, without affecting too much on performance, code problems, and other risky stuff. If you learn how to code properly, then you can avoid bugs later in the development of your mod. If you learn how to create materials properly, you will have an easier time altering and adding new materials in the future.
Managing development
When working on a mod, it is important to keep track of your and other's work, while making sure everyone knows what left to be done, what is already done and more. The following section provides tips, links to useful tools and guides which will help you to manage the project.
Keep in mind these are very important even for one-person projects! Keeping track of work always gets one far - it helps you plan and remember things.
Setting up a Scrum Board
In short, a scrum board is a board used for keeping track the team's development progress. It is used for:
- creating tasks
- assigning tasks
- tracking what is already done
- tracking what needs to be done
- tracking what is being worked on
- tracking bugs
In other words, it's a "to-do" list with more features.
One of the free tools which provides that is Trello. A guide to organise a board can be found here.
Version control
There is nothing worse than having something crash or overwriting a file and losing your progress. At the very least - back up your work often.
However, the recommended solution is version control. Systems such as Git help keep track of changes and back them up. Whenever you commit your work, a snapshot of the work is saved. In case something goes wrong, you will be able to go back to any older commit. Commits are stored in a special folder called a repository.
Furthermore, using services such as Gitlab or GitHub will let you store your repository online, saving it from accidental deletion or hardware failure.
However, possibly the most important feature of Git is collaboration. Working on all sorts of files with multiple people will get messy very fast if you just send them back and forth. Git allows multiple people to work on the same project simultaneously, and (after setting up) requires only a few clicks to upload ("push") your work and download ("pull") the work of others. It also helps you resolve any conflicts when multiple people edit the same file.
Finishing
Before the mod can be released, it should pass a series of procedures which will make sure the mod is clean of bugs and stable enough so it can be played by the public.
Playtesting
From now on, you should be running Playtests on the mod whenever possible. Playtests should be performed on the versions of the game in which you want to release. Don't let team members play from their personal versions of the mod, many hours can be wasted on finding bugs caused by incompatible versions.
Bugs and Changes
A complete list of all bugs and changes should be maintained, and their current status. Preferably this should be done in services like Trello. Notifying bugs on platforms like Discord is totally insufficient for tracking bugs; it's just too easy for the messages to stack up and get lost. After each playtest, the bugs and necessary changes from the log file should be added, and assigned to team members. When a team member has fixed a bug or change, they should submit the new content to the mod creator, who should verify that it is fixed and then update the status on the bug list.
Cut or Defer Broken Features
The hardest and unfortunately most necessary part of shipping is the act of being realistic and cutting features. Your mod simply cannot have every cool feature and still ship in a reasonable time frame. The creator of the mod should make decisions about what to finish and what to cut, based on how far along in the release process they are.
Post-Release
So you have released your mod, and soon enough rating and reviews started popping up. Your mod may or may not have been successful, but what comes next is up to you. The best approach is to learn from the feedback you get, see what worked and what didn't, and improve it for the next time. Talk with players, get involved in how they experienced your mod.
Making horror games is hard, and poses challenges not seen in other genres. It can take time to brew a good idea for a mod, so make sure you let it cook for enough time!
Knowing what to fix, what to change, and how to listen to your community is a continual learning process.
Good luck!